Here’s a better-late-than-never roundup of all the worthwhile pixel art I found throughout September. Next month I’m going to expand this feature to include every kind of interesting piece of video-game art (mostly 8-bit of course) I come across, since that’s sorta what I do anyway. For example, the above image really has nothing to do with pixels and everything to do with the NES. It comes from supermandolini. Without any more delay:

ffffound points us to this fun, misleading Atari Game Box. Speaking of Atari, check out these Atari Modern Classics, which re-create today’s games as classic old game boxes. You remember, when everything was a “Video Computer System Game Program” because those words, strung together like that, just sounded great?

Yeah, you gotta plug it in and the scale sorta ruins the whole point of it, but this “high definition” Lite-Brite from Bandai lets you use 1600 LEDs to make the design of your childhood dreams, plus it comes with software to let you plan out and preview things first. You know, because this is such a serious undertaking and all.

Here’s a beautiful video, called “Dot Matrix Revolution”, which chronicles (well, sort of) a history of the computer using pixel art. It’s by a Canadian group known as SuperBrothers. Better quality here.

Last month’s feature had a bathroom re-done entirely in 1×1 tiles along these lines, and now we’ve got it taken to the next, commercial step: get your finest-Italian-ceramic Tetris Tiles today.

Those two guys behind MythBusters rigged up 1100 paintballs to some kind of gigantic, insane gun and fired them simultaneously. It made a kind of painting in about a tenth of a second and is, if nothing else, funny.

Here’s an art installation by Antoinette J. Citizen in which an entire room is made into a Mario Brothers level, complete with sound effects coming out of the interactive boxes. I’ll take it for some obscure basement room in the gigantic suburban house I’ll probably never have.

Finally, NerdyShirts gives us this Nintendo Family Tree on a shirt, and we’re done for now. More next month!

It’s the end of August, and as such I’m back with the second installment of my pet obsession, the monthly roundup of various pixel-art products, designs, and various curiosities I’ve found online. While being a relatively minor part of the design world, I’ve made no secret before of my love for the artform, and every single day designers continue to do incredible things with it. We’ve got some high-profile pieces this month, plus a couple of websites and interactive games that are nothing short of brilliant.

First off, those legendary Germans eboy have published a new, extremely-limited-edition book, entitled Schmock. Published as part of a 500-copies-only series by Rojos, this little 160-pager is full of the studio’s recent work, most of which is pixel-centered, with some toy and t-shirt design thrown in too. Eboy are widely acknowledged as masters of the form: check out the prices on their first amazing book, long out of print, and glance at any of their insanely overloaded city posters to confirm as much. At the time of writing, there was one copy left, so it’s likely flown away to the land of overpriced amazon/ebay sellers by now. Console yourself with a t-shirt instead.

The high profile release I mentioned earlier is nothing other than Brian Eno and David Byrne’s new Everything That Happens Will Happen Today album. Released only through their website, the cover is an incredibly detailed drawing of a suburban house. They’re shipping out deluxe editions of the disc by November–if my dreams come true, the pixel theme will be expanded to glorious lengths for that version. Oh yeah, and the music: these are two giants of the last 40 years, and their one previous collaboration together, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, is fantastic. Expecting wonderful things from this one.

This is just beautiful–a Berlin-based designer created mockups in photoshop in order to figure out how to best tile his bathroom. His lively chronicle of the debate between he and his wife over what masterpiece of art they’d turn into a pixelated, tile-based bathroom wall & bathtub is both charming and enlightening–and just wait until you see their final choice for the tub. It’s absolutely genius. This is probably the best implementation of the 1×1 decorating aesthetic I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a flash game with an artistic bent–abstract pixels float around the screen, and only by moving your mouse to form the design can you move to the next level. To describe it sounds strange, but give it a try and you’ll find there’s something good about it–it’s like trying to pull one hundred pieces of floating confetti out of the air and into a unified whole. Did that make it any clearer? Nah, probably not. You’ll see it when you see it.

Another elegant flash work that uses only 1×1 pixels of different colour–mixed with some fun physics–to create piles of sand at the bottom of your browser. This falls into the “2-minute-diversions” category, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

And our last entry comes from Cubescape, a site that let you build an isometric world using a series of cubes. The most satisfying element for me is the option to “replay the construction” afterwards, which does exactly that: gives you a fast-moving animation of every block you (or other, more talented people) have dropped into place. Strangely gratifying. And with that, my roundup of one small corner of the design world is complete for another month–see you in September!

Alright, so the title is slightly misleading–German artist Gerhard Richter has been producing abstract “colour charts” since the early 1970s, long before pixel-art became a tangible theme in design. But his latest work is housed in a wonderfully different context: the famous Cologne Cathedral. Although this gargantuan building should be seen by everyone, now there’s even more reason for those interested in 21st century design to take the trip. Make it truly worthwhile and go on Carnival’s famous Rose Monday (not until February 23rd, 2009!) for one of the best European street festivals around.

We find, from the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, a succinct overview of the recent work and its reception:

A vast window by Richter was installed last year in the south transept of the Cologne Cathedral, a Gothic bastion of Roman Catholicism in northern Europe, which was begun in 1248 and finally completed in 1880 (when it became, for four years, the world’s tallest building). It is the Germans’ favorite tourist attraction, according to a recent poll.

His results continue to foster discussion among professional art critics and casual observers:

But controversy lingers in Cologne, where, despite the public’s acceptance, cynics have derided Richter’s work as “pixels” and “confetti.” [...] The literally paradoxical, if not quite heretical, results of [the project] pose a question of whether, in Christian Europe today, art on celebrated artists’ terms has risen to equality with religion or if religion has sunk to the level of mere art.

It turns out Richter was close to giving up when he laid one of his famous colour chart paintings over top an image of the church window:

Richter’s chief model was his own huge painting “4096 Colors” (1974), in which each of a thousand and twenty-four sprayed-enamel colors, in a graduated spectrum of hues and tones, appears four times. It was composed by chance. (Chance is “more clever than I,” he has said.) Richter likewise randomized the window’s squares within sections that mirror one another at intervals, like the rhymes in a verse form. The result employs seventy-two colors that he deemed consistent with those of the cathedral’s forty-three windows dating from 1260 to 1562 (which survived the war in storage), and close enough in tone to avoid spots of disrupting opacity and glare.

We’re crazy over the idea of sanctioned pixel-art in an antiquated container. Have any other stories of contemporary design in a radically unexpected context? Share them with us!

Designed by Cristian Zuzunaga, a graduate from the UK’s Royal College of Arts, Pixel Sofa isn’t far from its ever-so-befitting name. Produced by Danish manufacturer Kvadrat and sold through Moroso, the concept of a solitary pixel in its unique form is an interesting notion; used not only as inspiration but as the basis of a fabric design.

Spanish born, Cristian Zuzunaga believes the pixel is the icon of our time. A Designer of many mediums, Zuzunaga has gone from catwalk to graphic designer and now product designer in a very short decade. In all mediums, he has retained a geometrical, technologically consumed style which is unique and recognizable.

Commencing his work with two-dimensional paper soon progressed to printed textiles, Zuzunaga has teamed up with fashion designer, Peter Smith to create a pixelated menswear collection named QUADRAT. Based on Supermodernity- global cosmopolitan cities like London, Shanghai and New York and of course the pixel- the icon of our time.

We love this guy – top work!